Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

The door. Jack knew he had only to find the door, to open it, and a world of wonder and beauty would lie beyond. Then he understood that the door was within himself, not to be found by stumbling through eternal darkness. Such an exciting revelation. Within himself.

Paradise, paradise. Joy eternal. Just open the door within himself and let it in, let it in, as simple as that, just let it in. He wanted to accept, surrender, because life was hard when it didn't have to be.

But some stubborn part of him resisted, and he sensed the frustration of the Giver beyond the door, frustration and inhuman rage. He said, I can't, no, can't, won't, no. Abruptly the darkness acquired weight, compacting around him with the inevitability of stone forming around a fossil over millennia, a crushing and unrelenting pressure, and with that pressure came the Giver's furious assertion: Everything becomes, everything becomes me, everything, everything becomes me, me, me. Must submit… useless to resist… Let it in… paradise, paradise, joy forever… Let it in. Hammering on his soul.

Everything becomes me. Jarring blows at the very structure of him, ramming, pounding, colossal blows shaking the deepest foundations of his existence: let it in, let it in, let it in, LET IT IN, LET IT IN, LET IT IN, LET IT ININININININ- A brief internal sizzle and crack, like the hard quick sound of an electrical arc jumping a gap, jittered through his mind, and Jack woke. His eyes snapped open. At first he lay rigid and still, so terrified he could not move. Bodies are.

Everything becomes me. Puppets. Surrogates. Jack had never before awakened so abruptly or so completely in an instant. One second in a dream, the next wide awake and alert and furiously thinking. Listening to his frantic heart, he knew that the dream had not actually been a dream, not in the usual sense of the word, but… an intrusion.

Communication. Contact. n attempt to subvert and overpower his will while he slept… Everything becomes me. Those three words were not so cryptic now as they had seemed before, but an arrogant assertion of superiority and a claim of dominance. They had been spoken by the unseen Giver in the dream and by the hate entity that communicated through Toby in the graveyard yesterday. In both instances, waking and sleeping Jack had felt the presence of something inhuman, impedous, hostile, and violent, something that would slaughter the innocent without remorse but preferred to subvert and dominate. A greasy nausea made Jack gag. He felt cold and dirty inside. Corrupted by the Giver's attempt to seize control and nest within him, even though it.had not been successful. He knew as surely as he had ever known anything in his life that this enemy was real: not a ghost, not a demon, not just the paranoid-schizophrenic delusion of a troubled mind, but a creature of flesh and blood. No doubt infinitely strange flesh.

And blood that might not be recognized as such by any physician yet born. But flesh and blood nonetheless.

He didn't know what the thing was, where it had come from, or out of what it had been born, he knew only that it existed. And that it was somewhere on Quartermass Ranch.

Jack was lying on his side, but Heather was no longer pressed against him. She had turned over during the night. Crystals of snow tick-tick-ticked against the window, like a finely calibrated astronomical clock counting off every hundredth of a second. The wind that harried the snow made a low whirring sound. Jack felt as if he was listening to the heretofore silent and secret cosmic machinery that drove the universe through its unending cycles. Shakily, he pushed back the covers, sat up, stood. Heather didn't wake.

Night still reigned, but a faint gray light in the east hinted at the pending coronation of a new day. Striving to quell his nausea, Jack stood in just his underwear until his shivering was a greater concern than his queasiness. The bedroom was warm. The chill was internal.

Nevertheless, he went to his closet, quietly slid the door open, slipped a pair of jeans from a hanger, pulled them on, then a shirt.

Awake, he could not sustain the explosive terror that had blown him out of the dream, but he was still shaky, fearful-and worried about Toby.

He left the master bedroom, intending to check on his son. Falstaff was in the shadowy upstairs hall, staring intently through the open door of the bedroom next to Toby's, where Heather had set up her computers. An odd, faint light fell through the doorway and glimmered on the dog's coat. He was statue-still and tense. His blocky head was held low and thrust forward. His tail wasn't wagging. As Jack approached, the retriever looked at him and issued a muted, anxious whine.

The soft clicking of a computer keyboard came from the room. Rapid typing.

Silence. Then another burst of typing.

In Heather's makeshift office, Toby was sitting in front of one of the computers. The glow from the monitor, which faced away from Jack, was the only source of light in the former bedroom, far brighter than the reflection that reached the hallway, it bathed the boy swiftly changing shades of blue and green and purple, a sudden splash of red, orange, then blue and green.

At the window behind Toby, the night remained deep because the gray insistence of dawn could not yet be seen from that side of the house… Barrages of fine snow flakes tapped the glass and were briefly transformed into blue and green sequins by the monitor light.

Stepping across the threshold, Jack said, "Toby?" The boy didn't glance up from the screen. His small hands flew across the keyboard, eliciting a furious spate of muffled clicking. No other sound issued from the machine none of the usual beeps or burbles. Could Toby type?

No. At least, not like this, not with such ease and speed. The boy's eyes glimmered with distorted images of the display on the screen before him: violet, emerald, a flicker of red.

"Hey, kiddo, what're you doing?"

He didn't respond to the question.

Yellow, gold, yellow, orange, gold, yellow-the light… shimmered not as if it radiated from a computer screen but as if it was the glittering reflection of summer sunlight bouncing off the rippled surface of a pond, spangling his face.

Yellow, orange, umber, amber, yellow

At the window, spinning snowflakes glimmered like gold dust, hot sparks, fireflies. Jack crossed the room with trepidation, sensing that normality had not returned when he'd awakened from the nightmare.

The dog padded behind him.

Together, they rounded one end of the L-shaped work area and stood at Toby's side. A riot of constantly changing colors surged across the computer screen from left to right, melting into and through one another, now fading, now intensifying, now bright, now dark, curling, pulsing, an electronic kaleidoscope in which none of the ceaselessly transfigured patterns had straight edges. It was a full-color monitor.

Nevertheless, Jack had never seen anything like this before.

He put a hand on his son's shoulder.

Toby shuddered.

He didn't look up or speak, but a subtle change in his attitude implied that he was no longer as spellbound by the display on the monitor as he had been when Jack first spoke to him from the doorway.

His fingers rattled the keys again.

"What're you doing?" Jack asked.

"Talking."

…Masses of yellow and pink, spiraling threads of rippling ribbons of purple and blue. The shapes, patterns, and rhythms of change were mesmerizing when they combined in beautiful and graceful ways-but also when they were ugly and chaotic.

Jack sensed movement in the room, but he had to make an effort to look up from the compelling protomic images on the screen. Heather stood in the doorway, wearing her quilted red robe, hair tousled. She didn't ask what was happening. if she already knew. She wasn't looking directly at Jack or Toby but at the window behind them. Jack turned and saw showers of snowflakes repeatedly changing color as the display on the monitor continued its rapid and fluid metamorphosis.